Cultural Endurance Outside the Movie Theatre

If you wanted to see the indie thriller “Blue Ruin” when it opened in April, you could have visited a theatre in one of the cities where it was playing. Or you could have turned on your computer, TV, or phone and streamed it for about seven dollars. The film’s distributor, a division of the Weinstein Company called Radius-TWC, chose what’s known as a “day-and-date” release, making “Blue Ruin” available on cable and through online video-on-demand platforms such as iTunes and Amazon Instant Video on the same date it came out in theatres. Radius-TWC executives told me that this was an unusual approach for them—they have tried it with only three of the twenty films they have put out—but that it turned out to be a good move. “Blue Ruin” made a little more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in theatres—not bad for an indie film. But it made almost triple that amount through video on demand. Having spent more than a million dollars to buy, release, and market “Blue Ruin,” Radius-TWC is now close to turning a profit.

Video-on-demand platforms—V.O.D., for short—have been around for years, but film distributors have lately been pushing the day-and-date model. It’s long been the case that big-budget movies crowd multiplexes, which can make it difficult for smaller films to succeed. Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures, told me that, in the past, “you would open in a couple of theatres and spend a huge amount of money in the hopes that it would open wide so you could recoup that money, and it was an insane proposition on a business level.” Most theatrical releases don’t turn a profit, though. “It was an awful business model,” Bowles said.

But, distributors argue, if you make a film available to rent digitally for seven or eight dollars as soon as it hits theatres—right when awareness of the film is at its height—you can reach people who don’t want to see the film in a theatre, or who live in cities where the film isn’t playing. Moreover, making a film available both in theatres and on demand comes with few extra costs for distributors. Between delivering copies of a film to theatres and orchestrating ad campaigns, theatrical releases can cost a distributor millions of dollars; getting a film onto iTunes has a marginal cost of next to nothing. And while theatres receive a cut of around sixty per cent of a film’s box-office earnings, video-on-demand platforms usually take half that amount.

Yet there’s one important group of people that has’t quite been won over by the day-and-date model: filmmakers themselves. Typically, a filmmaker sells a movie to a distributor for a flat-rate advance after the movie screens at a film festival. The distributor then covers the cost of releasing and marketing the film and tries to turn a profit through ticket sales, video-on-demand rentals, and so on. The filmmaker gets a share of that revenue only if it reaches a certain predetermined level; it is common for filmmakers never to receive a payment beyond their initial advance. So while an especially lucrative day-and-date release can benefit a filmmaker in the long run, that outcome is far from certain.

Without an immediate financial incentive to use day-and-date, filmmakers often have different concerns. When distributors decide on a day-and-date release, they often remove films from theatres after only a week or two, using the theatrical engagements primarily to attract reviews and publicity. Films that don’t use the day-and-date approach often have much longer theatrical runs, because selling tickets is the only way they can continue to earn money until they are released on home video or on video-on-demand platforms months later. When a film plays in a theatre for twelve weeks, it stands a better chance of staying in the minds of moviegoers for at least that long.

Alex Ross Perry, who directed “Listen Up Philip,” which premièred at Sundance this year, feels that, while the day-and-date approach can insulate distributors against big losses, it makes big hits less likely. A year or two later, when both a twelve-week theatrical film and a day-and-date film with a shorter run are side-by-side on Netflix, people may have the impression that “one was a hit film that they saw the name of over and over, and the other is unfamiliar.”

Perry worries that a modest financial success helped by video on demand may still prove a cultural failure. A real success, he argues, is a film that endures in the popular imagination, not just one that quickly earns back its million-dollar budget. As he sees it, putting movies in theatres still plays a big role in establishing that cultural endurance. Perry told me that, if day-and-date is independent cinema’s salvation, “I am happy to be damned.” A distributor might not care about a film’s lasting power so long as it earns back its investment. But artists may be right to be concerned about whether their work will matter.

That view isn’t universal. Joe Swanberg, an indie director (“Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “Drinking Buddies”), thinks that people like Perry are just nostalgic for a bygone era. “For a lot of filmmakers, V.O.D. seems like a failure,” he told me by phone. “It feels like a straight-to-video release for them. There’s this big stigma that it has to overcome.” The distributors, meanwhile, “aren’t confused at all about it; they know that’s just a great space for their movies to make money and find an audience, so there’s this push-and-pull.”

“Hannah Takes the Stairs” was one of the earliest examples of how the day-and-date model could work: it ran for ten weeks in theatres, in 2007, and earned only twenty-two thousand dollars, compared to nearly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from video on demand. Swanberg feels that V.O.D. better reflects how people watch movies now. People are less willing to trek to the movie theatre and pay twelve dollars to watch a film on the big screen, but they might be willing to spend a bit less money to stream a feature on their TV screens. “For people like me who are making smaller, weirder movies, V.O.D. has kind of kept me in business,” he said, adding that it’s up to the filmmakers to accept “the realities of the audience.”

Jeremy Saulnier, the director of “Blue Ruin,” feels similarly. He spent more than four hundred thousand dollars to make the film, which he easily recouped when Radius-TWC bought the distribution rights last year for more than five hundred thousand dollars. Saulnier told me that, in general, he “would prefer traditional theatrical releases.” Yet he recognizes the importance, for a distributor, of turning a profit. “If we’d gone with a traditional release and a big campaign, ‘Blue Ruin’ would probably be mired in debt for eternity,” he told me. “I’d much rather have a film in the black and everyone happy and moving on.”